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6
SELF-WORTH
The plan each soul crafts for a lifetime includes myriad opportunities to learn. One of the things commonly included in a life plan is development or refinement of self-worth.
Many understand that our self-worth is influenced by the views of others. While this is true, trauma and other experiences in prior lives may have left the soul holding false beliefs about itself. When this happens, it is necessary for these false beliefs to be embedded in a future life so that a more positive and balanced view can be developed.
Those struggling with low self-esteem may be overly critical and belittle themselves. Some have a tendency to over identify with their weakness while minimizing or totally ignoring their strengths. They may have difficulty accepting their own behavior, particularly when they conclude their actions were a mistake. In the extreme, they cannot forgive themselves.
People who have not yet cultivated a strong self-worth give their authority to others, too often looking to them for assurance and validation. A corollary is that the suggestions and advice of others are perceived as criticism, even when none was intended. In these instances, lacking a positive sense of self leaves them at the mercy of others who may themselves be unkind, unflattering, critical, or, at worst, cruel.
Do you believe you have intrinsic worth, or are you like countless others who believe that they must earn their value?
Believing that you must earn your value is particularly rampant in communities and societies that disproportionately reward production. In these instances, bounty earned can falsely equate with a person’s value. Obsessed with produced value, people succumb to becoming human doings, losing sight of the fact that they have intrinsic value as human beings. This pattern contributes to stress, which is acknowledged to be one of the biggest, if not the greatest, determinant of disease and illness.
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In the cases that follow, you will see the brilliance of the soul’s strategy for correcting the falsely held views formed in prior lives. Righting false beliefs is not automatic and requires that they first be recognized. Very often before it is enhanced, one’s low self-worth causes emotional pain. As we have seen before, upheaval and dismay can be powerful motivators for change.
TINA
Tina is a 32-year-old woman who scheduled a transpersonal session with the hopes of gaining insight regarding her future and the dramas that have challenged her over the last fifteen years. Two boyfriends, Mingo and Xelu, died in tragic accidents. She has been physically victimized by three different men. And in her own words, her first business venture failed, despite the benefit of her advanced business education and acumen.
Early in her session, Tina found herself floating without a body in an ethereal space, surrounded by the star filled night sky, amidst a big swirl of galaxies. It is a familiar place where she felt good. Enjoying the sensation of floating, she sensed the presence of another who identified herself as Julia.
It feels like we are exactly the same. We are holding hands. We are staring at the galaxies together.
Tina learns that Julia is part of her soul that is currently living across the country in another state. Before incarnating, their soul decided to split its energy and send it into two concurrent incarnations on earth. This is a rare occurrence for souls, who are cautioned by spirit guides that this choice can result in not having enough energy for either to realize the plans that have been set in place for the lifetime. Nonetheless, this is something the higher self decided prior to incarnating. This decision has been forgotten by Tina, like all other aspects of the soul plan she crafted for this lifetime.
Julia, on the other hand, has developed a capacity for out-of-body travel and has visited Tina before. She is hopeful that Tina will also develop this skill. They had made no prior plan to meet in person during their respective lifetimes but had set the intention to connect “in soul state.”
Julia’s concern for Tina was evident from the outset. In fact, it was she who inspired Tina to pursue spiritual regression. Julia knew that the process could help Tina work through the issues she is struggling with. Julia’s perspective regarding Tina’s struggles was revealing and would prove invaluable to the insight sought by Tina.
I have missed Tina so much. I want her to be happy and to understand that she is not alone. The past is getting in the way of her being happy. She’s overwhelmed by the things that happened to her, including the death of both Mingo and Xelu.
These relationships were meant to teach her different things. Both were intended to help her along her spiritual journey. Mingo was her first love, he was all fun. Tina’s relationship with Xelu was more challenging due to his verbal and occasional physical mistreatment of her. The two relationships contrasted how love can manifest.
Now she is supposed to focus on being happy. One of the reasons I am here today is to remind her that she is supposed to be working on being happy. Tina is backing away as a result of the trauma of those losses. She needs to be less guarded but also to refine her capacity for discerning who is trustworthy.
Dating can be tough. Loving is worth the risk. BUT it shouldn’t be her primary focus!
She should invest less in dating relationships and more in herself, especially her interior world. Once she does that, love will flow more freely and naturally in external relationships.
Julia acknowledges that as a victim of violence and sexual assault, Tina would have reason to be guarded and unwilling to be open to love.
These experiences were built into her plan. The lessons she can take from them ultimately will protect her. She thought everyone was good. She needs to discern who is good and who is not. She needs to toughen-up to protect herself. She formed these beliefs from past lives leading her to be too trustworthy. She needs to learn to discern trustworthiness. Her relationships with both Mingo and Xelu were intended to help her practice this.
She needs to balance discernment with guardedness, to determine who can be believed. This is a tricky thing to achieve. Tina is practicing discernment at the networking events she attends. But she needs to learn not to be too disappointed when someone turns out not to be trustworthy.
She needs to focus more on her spirituality, to connect more deeply with her eternal nature. If she focuses on interior matters, she will find joy, love, peace, and equanimity. All of this is within her.
Julia elaborates when asked about finding love within.
It starts with yourself, but then it broadens to others. Tina is getting better about focusing on love of self, but she could be better. She has worthiness issues that have been brought in from prior lives. She had a lifetime in Miguel de Cervantes times when she was grasping for a man’s love. Her emotions obscured her objectivity. She did everything to gain his love, including making many sacrifices. He didn’t reciprocate. He turned away. Tina was competing for his attention with his wife and his many lovers.
This lack of worthiness is also impeding her professional success. Tina needs to focus on this before she begins her next venture. She has worked on several business start-ups. They didn’t go as planned because she didn’t see herself as worthy of success.
Knowing that Tina would benefit from practical advice about how to accomplish this spurred Julia to continue on.
In order to work on her lack of worthiness, she should spend time with children and animals. These ‘balls of unconditional love’ will help her. She needs to spend more time in nature. It will help ground her in her divine essence. This is the true reality. She will come to understand her true nature. It also will help her to not dwell on others.
I purposely brought her to viewing the night sky before as a reminder of how awe-inspiring nature is. Focusing on this can help her see herself within the grander plan. She needs to stop viewing herself as small and insignificant.
Following an energetic healing provided by unnamed, higher beings, Tina is visited by Mingo. The light-hearted and fun-loving way that he had been described was quite evident in his manner and statements. He joined in to reassure her that she is loved and that he is safe and having fun.
I am in a place, a cloud city. Everything is shiny and pretty. There are tall skyscrapers and brilliant colors and light everywhere. It is heavenly! I have been here since I died on earth. I spend time with pilots, working with them. It is fun. It is helping me to heal the residue from the plane crash. I am working on balancing the trauma from the crash with the fun of flying around with these pilots.
It was my time to leave, dying young was part of my plan. I didn’t do it to hurt anyone. People should stop feeling bad that I died young. I am having fun. I am waiting for my friends to come over, I am not planning to incarnate again in the near future.
Before Mingo departs, these young lovers spend quiet minutes wrapped in the presence of each other’s love. They have had numerous lifetimes together, including the one cut short. They depart, consoled knowing that they are eternally linked and that their love will never die.
In the counseling session that followed, Tina shared more of the details of prior romantic relationships that connect to her regression.
Sometime after Mingo and Xelu’s death, Tina began an on-again, off-again relationship with Xamín that spanned seven years. The dynamics were eerily similar to her debilitating affair during her Shakespearean lifetime, the unsatisfied longing due to her lover’s infidelity and the necessity for her to set firm boundaries in order not to be swept away by her sexual and emotional impulses. Tina can now see what learning and healing were embedded in that relationship.
Even though we were together in the past, that doesn’t mean we need to be together in this life.
She acknowledged that she will need to keep working on feeling good enough about herself so that she doesn’t succumb to unbalanced and unsatisfying relationships. She has come to understand that the struggle to resist such advances affords the perfect opportunity to build and strengthen feelings of worthiness.
Grasping for love and attention, in this and prior lifetimes, disempowered her. As Julia was eager to remind her, the emptiness that might be temporarily filled by this type of attention can never fill the yearning for wholeness.
The yearning for wholeness and value is universal and carried across many lifetimes. Many mistakenly look to others to fill this longing when the only permanent fill is within themselves. Connecting to one’s intrinsic worth is too often obscured by people and events in the exterior world. And so, developing a strong sense of self takes time and patience.
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As we will see in the next case, the words, actions, and treatment by others can try one’s patience, and in the interim, cause much heartache.
LEONOR
Leonor is 55-years-old and has just celebrated her 15-year mark in an engineering firm. She is happily married to her second husband. After reading Llewellyn’s Little Book of Life Between Lives, she grew excited about the prospect of connecting to her soul and learning more about her purpose in life.
Leonor mentioned that one of her challenges is lacking the confidence to speak-up at work. Although she considers herself quite competent, when called upon to discuss the programs that she oversees, she freezes-up. Interestingly, this was neither the focus she hoped to explore in her session nor an issue of great import. She tacked it on the end of our intake conversation. But as has happened with others, it turned out to be an important clue to the wisdom that awaited from the higher realms.
She was surprised to learn in her first past life regression that she had been put to death for killing a woman she believed was responsible for the death of her entire family. In that life, she was a young man nicknamed Bruto, who, because of his size and strength, had a reputation and history of being called on to protect people. Ironically, he was unable to save his family, who perished in a fire while he was away protecting others.
He was mocked by his peers, adding fuel to what was a raging emotional cauldron. Distraught and enraged, he lashed out at the woman he suspected was responsible. He was not certain if the girl died, nor did he specifically know what he was being accused of doing, even as he languished in prison. He was certain however that he should be punished for hurting someone. Although he had no recall of killing her, he accepted that he was her killer. He would later learn his assumption was wrong. Although executed for the crime, he was not guilty.
I moved Bruto back in time in an effort to understand the origin of his rage. He moved to several years before the fire. He described himself as a warrior who lived a solitary life, apart from the community that he was charged with protecting. Despite his sadness, his position required that he maintain a façade of strength.
I look so strong, so people expect me to be strong. I have to live-up to my reputation. I am a protector. I have been called a hero because I was able to defend the fortress. Despite this, I failed to save my family. I should have been there to protect my family. No one else could do it. I could have saved them, but I wasn’t there.
I can’t let people see my feelings of sadness and loneliness and my desire for attention, understanding, and comfort. They look to me as the protector.
Bruto’s needs went unmet, while he worked hard to project a false bravado.
Upon his death, Bruto was able to speak further about the beliefs that contributed to his sad and tragic life.
If I had saved them, I might not have had so much pent-up rage. I wouldn’t have lashed out. Life would not have ended like it had.
I should not have cared so much about what other people thought. If I hadn’t, maybe I would have expressed myself more. Understanding and expressing my feelings was difficult. If I thought more positively about myself, I could have had a happier life.
Here were the beliefs that would follow Bruto into future lives. The beliefs that the higher self purposely would pack into Leonor’s life plan with the hopes of bringing balance and resolution.
In the next session, Leonor discussed the insights gleaned from the previous session. She now understood that Bruto had been tricked into confessing. His limited cognitive functioning made it easy for the constables to manipulate him. His malleability and inability to speak-up for himself sealed his fate.
I think the point of Bruto’s story is that he was so totally misunderstood. He didn’t know how to handle or express his feelings. He carried such guilt for not saving his family. Then he was mocked for his failure. He was so mired in these feelings that he believed what other people were saying. He was beating himself up. Regardless of what actually happened with the young girl, he said ‘I’m guilty, whatever.’ The lesson for him was that he shouldn’t have cared so much about what others thought. Doing so can be disastrous. He should have thought better of himself.
Discussing her initial reaction to the regression, Leonor said that the theme resonated with her, noting that she does think too much about what others think.
Part of my inability to express myself is my worry about what others will think of me if I expose myself, including my weaknesses. I worry about how others are judging me. I don’t know what I was expecting, but to have this past life story come up was surprising. It showed me the relevance in my current life.
Weeks later, Leonor was excited to share that she took the message of Bruto’s life to heart and decided to risk speaking-up at work.
I told myself ‘okay, this is what it is, this is what I am. I’ve been working here for 15 years. I have qualities that have value. Some people like me, others may not, but don’t be so worried about speaking out.’
Leonor was happily surprised that what she had to say was so well received. More importantly, she realized how good it felt to come out of the shadows. Revisiting Bruto’s painful life had surfaced a deep issue regarding her self-worth. With this first victory to encourage her, she found directionality for the important work that remains.
Emotional and spiritual growth requires accepting yourself for who and what you are. Leonor’s experience is a reminder. Bolstering your self-worth is among the challenges we face in the process of mastering self-love. Bruto’s experience brought the price paid for not doing so into clear focus.
Like so many others, Leonor’s ideas about her worth have been shaped by others. There was intense pressure to conform during her teens. She was picked on for living in a lovely home and having nice clothes by peers who lived in more economically strained circumstances. She was bullied for getting excellent grades. She was teased for her looks.
There were things about me that I couldn’t accept. I felt so much pressure. People were cruel. Even though I met other people who thought I was pretty, I didn’t believe it enough because of all those years that I was picked on. I worried about what people thought. My own sense of self took some time to develop and was impacted by those experiences.
I struggled to fit in. I can’t say that I felt good about myself or that I was on my own list. There was no such list in my earlier years. I am pleased to be at a place now where I am more important to myself. Now I am on my list.
Despite early progress on that front, Leonor continues to work on trusting herself.
I am always looking for a guide to show me the way.
During her second regression, Leonor found herself in a garden with Lorenza, her higher self. Lorenza was displaying a brilliant jewel-embedded gold crown near her heart. Descriptors of the image and the sensations it elicits flowed.
I see a prince, a king, his majesty, the majesty within.
There is just love now. I want to feel what it’s like to be her. I feel like I am merging with her. I look at my body and feel my robes and my hands. The light shines outward. It beams out from the crown, upward and downward. It’s beautiful. I am seeing out through her eyes.
I am just enjoying the feeling of the crown within my chest and the light beaming out. It’s the Christ within.
Separating, Lorenza begins to move away. Her parting words remind Leonor that they are never apart.
There are no other words, I just feel her love.
Discussing the regression, Leonor later remarked that the reminder that divinity is within was quite a powerful message. She acknowledged that she still needs to work on self-esteem until she no longer thinks or says anything about herself that she would not think or say about God.
Leonor is not alone in recognizing that she does not yet treat herself the way she would treat God. For her, the future work is to uncover the beliefs that prevent her from fully realizing her divine essence.
She shared that on her way home from the previous session, a song by a favorite Cristiano artist was playing with the refrain “what have I done to deserve love like this.”
This is such a powerful song. The words resonate for me and are so reinforcing. Bruto didn’t know that God loved him. When Bruto died, I saw him clothed in brilliant light and engulfed in his mother’s love and unconditional acceptance. I wonder this love that God has for me, what did I do to deserve it?
Leonor was shown a life that very dramatically illustrated what can happen when someone doesn’t have a strong self-worth and is unable to speak their truth. Like Bruto, her sense of self was shattered by the beliefs of others. Blind to all of this, Bruto suffered. For Leonor, a different ending is possible. With the insights gleaned from her sessions, she says that she is now better prepared to uncover the beliefs that are preventing her from walking in the confidence and joy of her connection with her divine essence.
* * *
Challenges to self-worth manifest in many ways and may remain hidden until you dive deep through the pain to understand the embedded lessons. Such is the case for Angelina, the next person we meet.
ANGELINA
Angelina is 60 years old and has remained single after divorcing more than 20 years ago. She has one adult daughter with whom she is very close. For years, she was very satisfied being single, but in the past few years she has begun to open to the idea of finding a romantic partner.
She overcame early years of poverty to achieve financial security through characteristic endurance. The latter quality helped her to withstand the harsh family environment in which physical punishment and emotional abuse were extreme. Although she physically survived the mistreatment, she did not fare as well emotionally.
She has done several past life regressions and a life between lives session in an effort to release trapped anger and pain that has burdened her since childhood. She hoped to understand what her soul wanted to achieve by selecting her birth family and the abuse that dominated it.
In soul state, she gains valuable insight from her spirit guide about the rationale that led her to include suffering in her life plan.
Life is a gift, but she does not see it that way. For her, life is a burden. In fact, she views everything as suffering. She must understand the gift that she has been given in this life.
There is nothing like experiencing the worst to bring perspective. A gift is so much easier to appreciate after it has been taken away. Before this life, she was hiding, wasting her time. She was too afraid to move forward, waiting around for all the conditions to be perfect. Life is not like that.
Many lifetimes ago, Angelina formed a belief that she has no value. In that life, at six, she was orphaned when her parents starved to death. Nomadic life was filled with great hardship. Others ignored her as they tended to their own survival, leaving her to forage for her own food. She feared for survival. She remained invisible so that tribal members would not view her as a burden. That life reinforced a belief that she was better alone, that relationships were too dangerous.
At 16, she was taken by a man to bear his children and to care for him. He treated her as property, with the support of tribal members. She had no choice. Ten years later, she went into hiding after she killed him to escape his brutality and servitude. She died decades later having lived an isolated life, struggling to survive.
Even in that life, she had choices. She chose the hard road every time. She chose solitude over communal life. She chose to hide and not to risk connecting with people who she believed only cared about themselves. She came to believe that there was no joy anywhere and that pain was inescapable. No matter what you did, you faced the severity of life.
Angelina learns that these beliefs were replayed and reinforced in many prior lifetimes. Her lack of self-worth remains a seed that keeps sprouting-up. By bringing them into her current life, her soul has provided an opportunity for healing and balancing.
To assist, she is gifted with an energetic healing to help release the residue. The release helps her to connect to her divine essence. Sobbing, in the presence of the healing beings, she repeats several times.
I am a divine child of God. God loves me and values me. I have always been loved and valued by him. From this day forward, there will be no doubt that I have value.
After a long embrace, the higher beings depart, and I gently ease her out of trance. Her first words confirm that the session has helped her to see the thread weaving through her past lives to her current life.
In the lifetimes in which I was successful, I believed that I had to prove my value. I didn’t possess value, I had to earn it. All the lives in which I didn’t succeed just reinforced that I didn’t have value. In particular, in the lifetime when I was a spiritual leader but couldn’t save my followers from persecution, my sense of failure was huge. The pain of that failure has haunted me for centuries.
I see the connection to how we live in contemporary society. My current job is 100% about bringing value, the billable hours. You are not valued unless you continue to bring value to the company.
It is incredible how freeing it feels to finally reach the basis of my lack of worth.
The beliefs Angelina’s soul held for centuries prompted coping behaviors that fermented pain and robbed her of happiness. To break this long-held pattern of belief and behavior, her soul made a plan that would resurface them. Because they were extreme in their dimension and repetition, their resurfacing was equally extreme.
Through Angelina’s regressions and accompanying counseling work, she has released pain and crafted a strategy to overwrite prior falsely held beliefs. She is no longer captive to old beliefs that had trapped her in a cycle of anger and sadness.
She is approaching the work that lies ahead with a new optimism. She is filled with hope and anticipation of the peace and joy that she believes is now within her reach. Practice and patience are her silent helpers.
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In this next case, we meet Celso. His spiritual and emotional growth over the last several years has taught him the important connections between self-acceptance, self-worth, and the capacity for love.
CELSO
Celso is 45 years old. He is the oldest of ten siblings born to Mennonite parents. Despite his parents standing in their close-knit religious community, he decided as a young child that this way of life was too restrictive. After graduating high school, he moved from Ohio to Washington D.C. for the opportunities city life held.
He has scheduled a series of transpersonal regressions over the last several years to seek guidance from his guides and his higher self. He is working to overcome what he labels old anxieties and fears. He attributes these to his unforgivable behavior in a past life eons ago and his childhood in this life. He is stuck in his career and has yet to form a long-term relationship with a significant other. He believes both problems are related to his general malaise.
Like many others, his relationship with his parents looms large in his opinion about himself.
I wanted to leave the family because I felt that I never fit in and I never could get my father’s love or my mother’s love back.
He described his parents’ marriage as strained and day-to-day farm life as rigorous. Growing up, Celso was not close to his siblings, who are separated in age by more than 20 years. As an adult, relations have improved with some of them. Most of the family continues to live within the Mennonite community.
Despite the passage of decades, Celso carries beliefs that were shaped during a childhood molded through tragedy and survival. The demands of daily life robbed him of the nurturance he desired.
Celso’s family was devasted by a family tragedy. His young cousin died in a fire. For many years, Celso felt responsible, despite his own narrow escape and the fact that he was only 2-years-old at the time.
Decades later, his memory of the fire is palpable.
The three of us smelled smoke in the barn, and we went to explore. As we headed into the machine room, there was an explosion that engulfed my older cousin. My brother and I ran for help. My mother and aunt came running. My aunt was screaming. I interpreted the screaming as if she was blaming me for the tragedy.
Community members came by over the next several days. No one consoled or comforted me.
I thought people blamed me for the fire.
Celso attributes the fire and his inability to save his cousin as the reason his mother cut-off her love. Despite the trauma, there was no mental health or pastoral counseling provided to family members after the fire.
I lost her love after the fatal fire. She didn’t want to go through what my aunt went through when she lost her son in the fire.
Celso experienced a similar lack of emotional nurturance from his father.
I learned that to be loved by my father, I would have to strive. I would have to have value. I had to be good enough.
A year after his first session, Celso returned with less self-loathing. He had taken to heart the counsel received during his first session. Already, he was sensing a positive change within himself. While self-loathing had lessened, it had yet to be replaced with a positive self-worth. With progress, he turned his attention to the general malaise that typifies his life.
I feel like my life is wasted. I don’t feel productive as far as helping humanity or doing anything meaningful, including having a child. My law practice is small. It never took off. I am not sure what makes my life meaningful. I think my striving to find something meaningful is related to my always striving to regain my mother’s love.
Celso believes that his soul’s plan is tied to a past life in which he cut himself off from his soul family because of shame.
I am repeating the same theme, putting myself in the same situation. This time I didn’t choose to cut myself off, but my mother and father’s lack of love left me feeling completely alone. I feel like I am trying to climb out of a very deep hole.
I am learning the value of love. The one big lesson from this life is that I will never again cut myself off from love. I can see the impact that comes of it. It really messed up my life. I will never do that again.
Somewhat surprised about the change, Celso notes that he has more love in his heart than before.
I have been dating, even though I am not sure it will work out. I feel like I have love for that person.
Sometimes because I feel so bored, I wonder why I am still here. I haven’t accomplished my external life goals—having a vibrant practice, helping humanity, having children—that’s what makes life worthwhile. I want something that gives meaning to life.
I always believed that if you had love, your life would be fulfilled. I equated being loved with having an external value to humanity.
Celso is trying to break through his earlier belief that his value can be earned.
He is now in the third phase of soul development—learning about love, including love of others and love of self, although he still has beliefs related to the second phase, ‘accomplishment and success.’ He wonders whether perfecting love is his life purpose.
Once hypnotized, he explores the topic of love with the higher beings who have come to offer their counsel.
You are exploring different types of love, love of others, self-love. The Universe is full of love, there is always love to be found. The love of Source is ever present.
But there is too much junk blocking your experience of love—too many fears and anxieties. They get in the way of your experience of love. You need to stop believing that you have to earn love, and instead accept that you deserve it.
We encourage you to focus on self-acceptance and self-love. You haven’t focused on the latter much. You need to feel worthy.
Your worry that personal catastrophe is imminent creates a heavy burden. We have been working with you on this and see that you are ready to release this belief and be more ready to find joy in the moment.
Celso acknowledges to the guides that what he really wants is to feel good about himself. He wants to be happy and content, to allay his fears and to live in the moment. He is assured by the guides that they are working with him to accomplish this.
We want you to feel good, happy, and loved. Just be. Feel the path of love and embrace it. Practice embracing it.
If you choose, the path will open up. It will come, the Universe will provide it.
Celso has come to the session requesting that the higher beings help him to release any impediments on his path of wellness, prosperity, and love. He describes a psychic surgery taking place. He senses the removal of old debris that is no longer needed, both beliefs and emotions. He affirms his desire to be more spiritually connected, to embrace the light in whatever he is doing.
They are working on my heart some more. They are telling me to follow the path of love.
Celso recognizes that his strong will is going to be an asset as he works to progress.
In past lives, my ego was so strong it could move mountains. Ego was so prominent. Its dominance was a problem. I am going to give some of this strong will up and turn to Spirit to guide me. I can already sense the energy and freedom of this decision.
The guides have been emphatic that Celso’s path to self-worth and self-love require replacing faulty beliefs. On the path to clarity, he has come to understand that he was not singled out for what he experienced as emotional neglect by his mother. He can now recognize that her own emotional state was a factor, including her challenged and trauma-filled relationship with her own father.
I understand that she didn’t bond with my other siblings until much later. It wasn’t until after the youngest ones were born. I thought I was the only child she didn’t love. It was really more complicated.
With my father, he didn’t know how to be loving. He didn’t have love from his parents. The culture was to be a manly provider, a good upstanding member of the community.
Like most, Celso experienced childhood from the somewhat narrow and singular perspective of a child acutely aware of his own wants and needs. As an adult seeking to heal, he is learning to incorporate a deeper understanding of the complexity of adult life. In particular, he is learning how the demands of raising and providing for ten children on a farm contributed in many ways to what he describes as both his mother and father’s emotional detachment.
The guides enumerate his next steps.
Celso still needs to be vigilant. It is still up to him. He has the power, the consciousness, and the will to not allow these thoughts and feelings to creep back. He could revert back, rendering our work for naught.
Celso needs to avoid old fears and anxieties. By dwelling on his perceived lack of parental love, he was giving energy to these fears and anxieties. As a result, his fears and anxieties grew. Only Celso can decide to stop this.
Until new beliefs are fully reinforced, this new way of being isn’t solidified. He needs to embrace the feelings they induce and revel in the feeling of love. He is free to be who and what he wants to be. Celso needs to have trust and confidence, knowing that we are here to support him in that effort.
His inability to forgive himself for actions in a past life left him with shame and loathing. Before, his only connection to life was through anger and hate, including anger at Spirit. This left him with nothing to hold onto. All he had was the energy of hatred, anger, self-righteousness, selfishness, and revenge. We have replaced these fragments with light, the energy of universal love.
Celso must embrace the light that he is experiencing here. The more he focuses on it, the more energy will be entrenched in his brain, energy field, and his soul.
You can more easily spread the power and magnitude of light than the energy of darkness. Light is so much easier to grow and spread. Its growth is exponential! When you send out light, it comes back ten-fold.
As the guides prepare to leave, Celso is asked whether he is ready to follow the guidance that they have provided.
Yes. Even if I falter, it would be a travesty not to take advantage of your counsel and the healing you have gifted.
Like all who pursue regression therapy, Celso will need to remain vigilant. His sessions have provided relief, guidance, and a desperately needed emotional boost. He has received help to untangle long held beliefs that caused him to suffer emotionally. But he will need to work to reinforce the clarity that he has gained and the positive feelings that will flow if he can prevent outdated, negative thoughts and worries from creeping back.
His anger and hate have been replaced with a knowing that the more he pursues the path of love, the more his sense of self-worth and self-love will increase.
* * *
In the next case, we meet Sele whose low self-worth has been reinforced through lifetimes of violation, exploitation, and abuse. She learns how her responses to this mistreatment solidified the misery that would become the hallmark of far too many lives.
SELE
Sele is a 45-year-old single woman who is employed as an executive librarian. She has grown up in a loving and supportive family. She believes that familial love provides an emotional safety net, while romantic love must be earned. She has difficulty forming and asserting an opinion, including speaking-up on her own behalf. Because of this, she has remained silent about her low wages, despite the scope of her responsibility in overseeing a big-city library system.
She was drawn to life between lives hypnotherapy to understand what her soul had planned for this lifetime relative to issues she struggles with. These include low self-worth, excessive weight, and fears preventing her from pursuing romantic relationships.
Over the course of her sessions, Sele would review several past lives that shed light on her current challenges.
Once regressed, Sele revisits a past life in the 1800s. Her name is Leire, and she became indebted to her older sister Violeta who raised her from the age of six after the tragic death of their parents. Sele experiences the loss of her loving parents as abandonment, which seeds fears that grow throughout her lifetime. She believes that no one will love her, and that loving is not worth the risk.
Everyday life is filled with the comforts of upper-class society. But Leire lives in the shadow of Violeta, whose effervescence charms everyone. Her life is filled with obligation, initially caring for Violeta’s children, and for decades serving as a household servant. Over time, their loving bond is strained as Leire’s unhappiness intensifies over their arrangement. In later life, Leire reflected on the many years that she spent attending to Violeta’s needs and solving the problems that she created.
I came to believe that I had no intrinsic value, that I had to earn my value. It would have been easier to die and not have to serve Violeta.
Leire spent a lifetime tolerating Violeta’s selfishness and dominance. Despite being attracted to Vicente, the butler, she did not pursue a relationship with him, anticipating rejection and fearing that she would incur Violeta’s wrath. Her fears were amplified by her unresolved grief for her parents’ death. In choosing safety, Leire retreated from life and in so doing reinforced a belief formed in a lifetime centuries before. In that life, she came to believe that loss of love may be too painful to endure.
Near the end of her life, Leire reflected back.
I will have to learn to speak up for myself in the future, to have my own voice, and know that just because you speak up for yourself doesn’t mean you are being disrespectful. This is connected to self-love.
In soul state, she expresses relief and acquires a deeper understanding of her soul lessons.
I didn’t live the life I was meant to live. I was supposed to be more assertive, have a career and a relationship. I had planned to be a teacher. I was meant to be with Vicente. I didn’t allow for that relationship to unfold. I was supposed to be more independent. I didn’t believe in myself. This is the issue that my soul has been working on. I am going to have to have a do-over life!
I have had many lives in which I was a woman and self-worth was questioned. It is woven into my very fabric.
Delving deep into the past requires that you accept without judgement the barbaric actions levied on millions throughout the course of history. Understanding the impact of prior victimization can do much to free yourself from the grip it may still have on you, despite the passage of centuries. Sele’s desire to free herself from debilitating emotions and unproductive coping mechanisms gave her the courage to uncover the origin of the limitations.
Asked if she knows the origin of this theme of self-worth, Sele moves to a lifetime almost a thousand years ago.
Sele describes a life in the 12th century when at age 12, she was literally torn away from her loving parents who were powerless to combat the wealthy lord who kidnapped her. Her name was Misera. She is grossly mistreated. Stripped of her freedom and separated from her loving family, she spent most of her time daydreaming about escaping captivity.
I was caged in a small cell all of the time when I was not serving as his sexual slave. Sex was a horrible ordeal. Food was my only comfort in life. I walled off all my feelings as a way to cope with it. Eight years later, in his presence, I killed myself to escape the torment. I exerted the only control I had, communicating that I would rather end my life than be with him. It took all of my power and strength to escape in this way.
Sele moves beyond the recall of her lives as Leire and Misera and enters the interlife where she encounters her spirit guide Miguel. She is comforted by his loving presence as he guides her to a beautiful beach. She sees herself as a brilliant, bright light.
Miguel and she begin a lengthy conversation that initially focuses on her first life in 600 BC in which she died at 8-years old. Her name was Ria. She recalls.
It’s weird to be in a human body form. It’s like stepping into a pool. You only go a few feet. You can’t jump right in. You have to wade in slowly.
Life on earth is difficult, very challenging. Human emotions are deep. They are some of the deepest in the Universe. Sometimes you need a respite.
They discuss other lives that she has had in which she was viewed as property by her husband. She had no voice and assumed limited roles for sex and procreation. The experiences of these lives compounded the feeling of worthlessness experienced during her life as a sexual slave.
Sele becomes more reflective of the issues that have caused her to struggle.
Women are no different than men. We are all the same and deserve to be treated in the same way. People don’t treat each other the same out of fear.
I have to learn to respect my own voice and know that it has worth. This will be the focus of my next lifetime. I have opinions, but I don’t think that others will value my opinion. I want others to want to hear what I have to say. I can achieve that without being in a powerful external position.
Miguel’s loving assurances provide comfort and insight.
Sele will need to learn to trust herself, to trust that whatever unfolds will be positive and benefit her. She needs to apply her strength. Good things will happen as long as she believes that they can happen. When you don’t believe that good things can happen, you close the door to their unfolding. Sele has closed the door to many things in her life. Developing confidence is a big part of what she still needs to work on.
Sele understands that she will need to employ all of her strength to overcome deeply embedded feelings of unworthiness.
The topic of the conversation shifts to Sele’s struggle with weight.
In her lifetime as Misera in the 12th century, she was entrapped by the ruler who was captivated by her extreme beauty. Beauty had become a liability. Sele’s weight has become a disguise, protecting her from the type of victimization that she experienced in that lifetime. Weight obscures her beauty. But it also reinforces the belief that she is not good enough or attractive enough. So, it further eats away at her self-worth.
She has to reconcile that beauty is not reflected in your size. Self-worth does not come from your size. It comes from loving yourself despite what size you are. It’s an example of how she is not leaving the door open to have other people value her, because she is not valuing herself. The biggest obstacle that is keeping love out of her life is her disbelief. Once she comes to fully understand this, love will come, regardless of her weight.
Misera, Leire, Ria, and Sele all had been loved and cherished by their parents. But repeated mistreatment by men left Sele fearing equating sex and love.
Sex was polluted in her prior experiences. It was not something from which she could garner pleasure. She believes that sex can be repulsive. Sele is not in tune with her sexuality because of this belief.
She believes that when someone is interested in you, all they want is sex. So, relationships have been something that she has chosen to avoid.
All of this is an effort to self-protect. She fears intimacy. She is protecting herself from rejection, protecting herself from abandonment, and protecting herself from becoming a sexual commodity.
At a deep level, she believes that the joy of love is not worth the risk of losing it or experiencing the pain.
The path forward begins to surface.
Sele has to become comfortable in herself as a sexual being. It is not something to fear. She needs to let go of her inhibitions. They are holding her back. She needs to live life.
Her desire to be more independent is intertwined with her intention to overcome her inhibitions. It is unfolding even though it has been a slower process then was hoped. She is on the road to doing what she needs to do. She needs to be patient in this knowing and accept that everything happens at the right time and right place.
She needs to learn that it is okay to take risks. It’s okay to be vulnerable. Opening one’s heart is worth the risk. She needs not to run away from love. Being scared is part of it, she just can’t let herself be overwhelmed by it.
As the session begins to draw to a close, Miguel and the members of Sele’s council are quick to offer their praise.
She has embraced the plan she set in place for this lifetime. It’s all positive. She chose a professional career that has enabled independence. She is finding her voice and building confidence that her opinions will be valued. She has been open to grow, fully embracing the journey.
She is growing better able to accept that she is worthy of love.
She is a good soul with very good energy. She should carry that forward because it will take her far, farther than she can imagine.
The best is yet to come, much lies ahead for her. She will reach a point in which she will revel in the joys of life. She has been through a lot in previous lives. Life is meant to be rewarding for her this time.
The closing words of the session not only speak to Sele but resonate for all.
Humans come to understand many things through their physical senses, but not love. Love is an energy. Soul energy is love. That’s what we are at the core. Most humans don’t understand this. They get lost in the murk of earthly existence, which obscures the true meaning of love. If they loved themselves truly and freely, they would not get confused. So, if you are able to stay true to yourself, you will be able to find love.
When you quiet your mind and still your body, the energy that is pulsating through you is love. You can’t quantify it. That is why people who meditate have so much peace, because in meditation, you experience love. That’s what is running through the body.
God, the Source, is the same energy that is pulsing through our veins. It is the same energy that leaves the body and continues on after it is shed at death and our soul goes back to the Source. It is not something that you can see or quantify.
The Source is a significantly larger manifestation of this energy, larger than the Universe. You have heard many times that each soul is like a drop of water in the vastness of the oceans. God is the ocean, and each soul is like a drop of that water. It is the same energy. God is infinite love energy.
In your successive human lives, you are trying to understand love to the best of your abilities. You are trying to live in that love so that it is all you exude to those around you. When you reach that point, your experience of life changes dramatically.
Humans are trying to remember the part of themselves that is just love. They are seeking to live and bask in love. Those who allow love to guide them pave the way for it to usher in peace and bliss that awaits.
For Tina, Leonor, Angelina, Celso, and Sele, love is the energy that is now mending their fractured self-worth and fueling their emotional healing and spiritual growth.
